The Avignon Papacy (1309-1376)

The crisis between Boniface VIII and Philip the Fair

The Avignon drama can only be understood from the conflict that ravaged the Church at the end of the 13th century. Boniface VIII (Benedetto Caetani, pope from 1294 to 1303) claimed, in the line of Gregory VII and Innocent III, the fullness of spiritual power over all Christian princes. The king of France Philip IV the Fair claimed for his part an absolute royal sovereignty over his subjects, including ecclesiastics, whom he intended to tax to finance his wars with England. The clash was inevitable^[1].

Boniface VIII replied with two bulls of exceptional firmness. Clericis laicos (24 February 1296) forbade, under pain of excommunication, any taxation of the clergy by a civil power without pontifical authorization^[2]. Unam sanctam (18 November 1302) affirmed, in its sharpest formula, the unity of the Church under the authority of Peter's successor and concluded: "we declare, state and define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff"^[3]. Philip the Fair then mobilized jurists, Estates General and public opinion to prepare the trial of strength.

The attack of Anagni (7 September 1303)

On 7 September 1303, the royal jurist Guillaume de Nogaret and a member of the Roman family hostile to the Caetani, Sciarra Colonna, stormed the pontifical palace of Anagni (Latium) with some two thousand men-at-arms. The pope, old and alone, refused to flee and received his aggressors vested in the papal cope. According to the chronicle of William of Nangis and the account of Dante (Purgatorio, XX, 86-90), Sciarra Colonna is said to have slapped the pontiff — an episode that remained famous as the schiaffo d'Anagni ("the slap of Anagni"), although the historian Jean Favier has shown that it is probably a 14th-century narrative amplification^[4].

Boniface VIII, freed after three days by the people of Anagni, returned to Rome a broken man. He died on 11 October 1303. His successor Benedict XI (Niccolò Boccasini, Dominican), elected on 22 October 1303 — eleven days after Boniface VIII's death, at the end of a conclave of a single day —, reigned only nine months and died on 7 July 1304 in circumstances his contemporaries suspected to be suspicious, without having been able to decide between absolution and excommunication of the culprits of Anagni^[5].

The conclave of Perugia and the election of Clement V (1305)

The conclave that opened at Perugia was divided. The French cardinals and the Italians hostile to Boniface pushed a conciliatory candidate; the cardinals faithful to the dead pope's memory wanted an intransigent Italian. After eleven months of deadlock, the compromise settled on a man from outside the curia: Bertrand de Got, archbishop of Bordeaux, a Gascon, a subject of the king of England for Guyenne but well regarded by Philip the Fair. He was elected on 5 June 1305 and took the name Clement V^[6].

Bertrand de Got refused to go to Rome for his coronation and chose Lyon, an imperial city but accessible to the king of France. He was crowned there on 14 November 1305 in the presence of Philip the Fair. The curia remained itinerant in France for four years — Mâcon, Bordeaux, Poitiers — before Clement V settled in Avignon on 9 March 1309, in the bishopric he chose for its central position between France, Italy and Provence^[7]. No act then decided that the pontifical see left Rome: Clement V explicitly envisaged returning there, but never did.

The durable settlement under John XXII (1316-1334)

On Clement V's death (20 April 1314, at Roquemaure), the conclave dragged on for two years and four months, split between Italians and Gascons. Assembled by force at Lyon by the count of Poitiers (the future Philip V), it finally elected on 7 August 1316 Jacques Duèze, a cardinal from Cahors, under the name John XXII. The new pope, seventy-two years old, a rigorous jurist, fixed the curia at Avignon and no longer envisaged a swift return to Rome, where the Visconti of Milan, the Ghibellines (the Italian party backing the emperor against the pope) and bands of condottieri (mercenary war leaders) made any pontifical settlement dangerous^[8].

The Comtat Venaissin, papal land since 1274

To grasp the situation, three different legal entities must be distinguished, which popularization often confuses: the France of King Philip the Fair, the kingdom of Arles dependent on the Holy Empire, and the papal lands.

The Comtat Venaissin — the territory surrounding Avignon without including it, with Carpentras as its capital from 1320 — had become the direct property of the Holy See in 1274. Bequeathed to Alphonse of Poitiers (brother of Saint Louis) then, on his death in 1271, reverted to the Crown, it was ceded to Pope Gregory X by Philip III the Bold, in execution of the treaty concluded at the Second Council of Lyon (Lyon II, 1274). The Comtat remained papal land until its attachment to revolutionary France in 1791^[9].

Avignon, vassal of the king of Naples

The city of Avignon itself, by contrast, was neither French nor papal when Clement V settled there. It belonged to Charles II of Anjou, count of Provence and king of Naples, himself a vassal of the Holy See for his Italian kingdom. Yet Provence and the Comtat were part of the kingdom of Arles, a fief of the Holy Roman Empire since 1032 — so that, legally, Avignon was an imperial city, not part of the Capetian royal domain.

This legal independence changes everything. When contemporaries and historians speak of a French "exile" of the papacy, they describe a real cultural and linguistic proximity — the cardinals were mostly of Limousin or Occitan origin —, but not a direct political stranglehold of the king of France over the city. On Provençal soil, the pope remained the temporal sovereign of a domain where the king of France had neither jurisdiction nor police.

The purchase of the city by Clement VI (9 June 1348)

The city's ambiguous status was settled under Clement VI (Pierre Roger). Following the murder of Andrew of Hungary by the courtiers of his wife Joan I, countess of Provence and queen of Naples, the latter came to Avignon in 1348 to justify herself before the pope, her Neapolitan suzerain. Clement VI presided over the retrial, absolved Joan of the murder — a decision contested by historians —, and bought Avignon from her on 9 June 1348 for 80,000 florins of gold, a modest sum suggesting that the absolution was part of the "price"^[10].

From that date, Avignon became fully papal land: the papacy was henceforth at home there, which made the question of the return to Rome all the heavier.

Over sixty-seven years (1309-1376), seven pontiffs succeeded one another, all French and all Occitan (Gascony, Quercy, Languedoc, Limousin), and historiography is wrong to think of them as interchangeable: their personalities, their orders of origin, their political choices differed profoundly.

Clement V (1305-1314)

Bertrand de Got, born around 1264 at Villandraut in Gironde, archbishop of Bordeaux since 1299, became pope without ever having been a cardinal — an extremely rare situation. His pontificate was dominated by three matters in which royal France forced his hand: settling the Boniface VIII / Nogaret dispute (Clement V ended by absolving Nogaret on 27 April 1311 against an oath), the proceedings against the Templars (see below) and organizing the ecumenical council of Vienne (1311-1312) which brought these two dossiers together.

The historian Sophia Menache methodically demonstrated, in her Clement V (Cambridge UP, 1998), that Bertrand de Got was neither the servile servant depicted by the black legend nor an unblemished hero: he resisted as much as he could Philip the Fair, but always staked his political survival between a France impossible to confront head-on and an ungovernable Italy. He died on 20 April 1314 at Roquemaure, in Provence, returning from a cure at the waters. His nephew Bertrand de Got the younger, who inherited a scandalous fortune in jewels and coin, already illustrated the evil that would gnaw at Avignon: nepotism^[11].

John XXII (1316-1334)

Elected at seventy-two after twenty-eight months of vacancy, Jacques Duèze (John XXII) was the administrator par excellence. A canon lawyer from Cahors trained at Montpellier and Paris, former chancellor of Charles II of Anjou, he definitively fixed the curia at Avignon, organized the Apostolic Chamber, multiplied beneficial reservations and annates, and left at his death a treasure valued at 800,000 florins of gold^[12].

His pontificate was marked by three great crises: the quarrel with Louis IV of Bavaria, who had himself crowned emperor at Rome by a Franciscan antipope (Peter of Corbara, Nicholas V) in 1328; the quarrel over poverty with the Franciscan Spirituals and William of Ockham; and the beatific vision controversy which we treat below. On this last point, despite his last-minute retraction, John XXII remains the archetype of the clumsy theologian pope — erudite in his law but unsure in his mystical christology. He died at Avignon on 4 December 1334, at about ninety years of age.

Benedict XII (1334-1342)

Jacques Fournier, a Cistercian of Boulbonne Abbey, former bishop of Pamiers (where, as inquisitor, he led the famous inquiry against the last Cathars of Montaillou, taken up by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in Montaillou, village occitan), was elected on 20 December 1334. He took the name Benedict XII, in memory of Saint Benedict, and embodied, for the first time since Boniface VIII, an austere reformer type of pope^[13].

His work was threefold. Reform of the religious orders: in 1335, 1336 and 1339 he published three great reforming constitutions for the Cistercians (Fulgens sicut stella), the Benedictines (Summi magistri) and the Franciscans (Redemptor noster), restoring discipline and observance. Administrative reform: he limited his predecessor's abusive beneficial reservations, refused nepotism and recalled his own relatives to the poverty of their condition. Dogmatic definition: his constitution Benedictus Deus of 29 January 1336 ended the beatific vision controversy (see below).

Politically, he failed to move closer to Rome. The construction of the Old Palace of Avignon (1335-1342) betrayed despite himself a settlement that believed itself temporary and became permanent. He died at Avignon on 25 April 1342.

Clement VI (1342-1352)

Elected seven days after Benedict XII's death, Pierre Roger, a Limousin Benedictine, former archbishop of Sens then of Rouen, former chancellor of King Philip VI, was the exact opposite of his predecessor. A brilliant orator, a lettered theologian, a magnificent patron, Clement VI displayed from the outset the reverse style: in a famous phrase lent him by a medieval author, his predecessors supposedly did not know how to use the pontifical office as he did — meaning: multiplying reservations of benefices and governing as a monarch^[14]. He deployed a court as sumptuous as the royal courts — hence the French nickname the Magnificent — and built the New Palace (1342-1351) which almost doubled the palace's surface. It was he who bought back Avignon in 1348.

His pontificate was dominated by the Black Death which ravaged Europe in 1347-1349: Clement VI intervened twice in 1348 in favour of the Jews accused of spreading the plague — a first act on 4 July (renewal of the Sicut Judaeis protection), then the bull Quamvis perfidiam of 26 September 1348, condemning anti-Jewish massacres and placing the Jews under his protection; he himself, on the advice of his physician Guy de Chauliac, surrounded himself with great fires^[15]. It was, in the terrible night of the mid-14th century, one of the most defensible political acts of the whole Avignon papacy.

He died at Avignon on 6 December 1352, after naming his nephew Pierre Roger de Beaufort cardinal — the very man who twenty years later would be the pope of the return to Rome.

Innocent VI (1352-1362)

Étienne Aubert, former bishop of Noyon, former cardinal-bishop of Ostia, was elected after a conclave capitulation — a written text the cardinals imposed on the future pope to limit his power — which the electors wished to be binding. As soon as elected, he annulled it as contrary to the sovereignty of the Roman pontiff^[16]. Innocent VI returned to the sobriety of Benedict XII: he reduced curial expenditure, expelled absentee beneficiaries, encouraged the orders.

His great political act was sending to Italy the Spanish Cardinal Gil de Albornoz, former archbishop of Toledo. From 1353 to 1357, at the head of a pontifical army, Albornoz reconquered the scattered Papal States and drafted the Constitutiones Aegidianae — the "Constitutions" of Fano (1357), from Albornoz's Latin name (Ægidius) —, a legal code that remained in force in the pope's States until 1816. This territorial restoration was the material condition for the papacy's return to Rome — which would nevertheless only happen under his successors. Innocent VI died at Avignon on 12 September 1362.

Blessed Urban V (1362-1370)

The sixth Avignon pope was not a cardinal but a monk: Guillaume de Grimoard, Benedictine abbot of Saint-Victor of Marseille, on diplomatic mission in Italy for Innocent VI, was elected in his absence on 28 September 1362. He took the name Urban V, one of the two popes in the series elected without being cardinals, with Clement V^[17].

His eight years as bishop were the holiest of Avignon. He kept the monastic habit under the tiara, refused curial pomp, fought simony and nepotism, founded studia (houses of higher study preparing for university), notably at Trets in Provence, and supported the University of Toulouse with privileges. Above all, he attempted the return to Rome: he left Avignon on 30 April 1367, landed at Corneto then arrived at Rome on 16 October 1367. He stayed there three years, restored Saint Peter's and Saint John Lateran, received on visit the Byzantine emperor John V Palaiologos who made his Catholic profession of faith on 18 October 1369 (with no lasting success at Constantinople), and received Saint Bridget of Sweden who predicted his death if he returned to Avignon^[18].

Faced with pressure from the French cardinals who ill endured Rome, and the deterioration of Italian security, Urban V yielded: he left again for Avignon on 5 September 1370 despite Saint Bridget's entreaties. He died indeed three months later, on 19 December 1370, faithful to his monastic poverty. He was beatified by Pius IX on 10 March 1870, alone among the seven Avignon popes to receive this honour — a sign that the Church herself, in her secular discernment, perfectly distinguishes holy figures from their problematic historical setting.

Gregory XI (1370-1378)

The last Avignon pope, Pierre Roger de Beaufort, nephew of Clement VI, had been a cardinal since the age of eighteen (his uncle's abusive creation of 1348), and was still only a deacon when elected on 30 December 1370; he had to be made priest then bishop within days before his coronation of 5 January 1371^[19]. At forty-one, Gregory XI was a cultivated man, having studied as a cardinal at the University of Perugia, where he became a canonist and theologian, pious, sincerely resolved to return to Rome — a desire he is said to have vowed to fulfil even before his election.

Three forces converged to achieve this return: the pressure of Saint Catherine of Siena (who came to Avignon in 1376), the prophecies of Saint Bridget of Sweden (died 1373, canonized 1391), and the Italian deterioration — the War of the Eight Saints against Florence (1375-1378), which threatened to lose the Papal States barely reconquered by Albornoz. Gregory XI left Avignon on 13 September 1376, embarked at Marseille on 2 October 1376, and landed at Corneto, then entered Rome on 17 January 1377. He died at Rome on 27 March 1378, immediately opening the crisis of the Western Schism.

The edifice that materializes the Avignon Papacy is one of the most impressive monuments of European Gothic. With some 15,000 m² of floor space — in volume, the equivalent of four Gothic cathedrals, according to the monument's official figure —, it housed at once the pontifical residence, the administration of Latin Christendom, the treasury, the Saint-Martial chapel, the refectory (Grand Tinel), the cardinals' chambers and the library^[20].

The Old Palace of Benedict XII (1335-1342)

The first ensemble was commissioned by Benedict XII and entrusted to the architect Pierre Poisson of Mirepoix. The worksite lasted about seven years (1335-1342) and produced an austere, almost monastic construction, organized around two cloisters: the cloister of Benedict XII and the Tower of the Angels (the pope's private residence). The Cistercian spirit of Benedict XII is legible in the stripped volumes, the predominance of bare stone, the absence of profuse ornamentation. The Chamber of the Stag, later decorated by Clement VI, was at this stage still a simple defence tower^[21].

The New Palace of Clement VI (1342-1351)

Barely elected, Clement VI launched the great worksite that would double the edifice. Entrusted to the architect Jean de Louvres (or de Loubières), the New Palace was built in under ten years, between 17 July 1342 and 21 October 1351^[22]. It housed the Grand Audience (where the tribunal of the Rota sat), the Great Chapel (52 metres long, 15 metres wide and 20 metres high, one of the largest of the Middle Ages), the Chamber of the Stag where Clement VI worked among profane hunting frescoes, and the Tinel (pontifical refectory).

The whole was, on its completion in 1351, the largest civil Gothic palace in the West. It bore witness to a new political function: the papacy was no longer merely a Roman episcopal see — it was a centralized ecclesial monarchy endowed with a court, an administration and a budget comparable to those of the great European kings.

The painted programme of Matteo Giovannetti and Simone Martini

The Palace's artistic radiance was not confined to its stone. Clement VI brought from Viterbo the painter Matteo Giovannetti, whom he named the pope's official painter in 1346. With his Franco-Italian workshop, Giovannetti executed the frescoes of the Saint-Martial chapel (life of Saint Martial of Limoges, the pope's patron), of the Saint-John chapel, and of the Grand Audience (cycle of the prophets)^[23].

Before him, Simone Martini, master of the Sienese school, had worked from 1336 at the porch of Avignon's Notre-Dame des Doms cathedral, where he painted a Marian cycle of which the sinopias (preparatory sketches) survive. It was at Avignon that Simone met Petrarch, whose portrait of Laura — today lost but celebrated by sonnets 77 and 78 of the Canzoniere — he painted.

The Avignon Palace thus became a Franco-Italian artistic laboratory of which the art historian Enrico Castelnuovo showed, in his classic work Un peintre italien à la cour d'Avignon (1962), that it prepared, in advance, some of the pictorial devices of the Italian Quattrocento.

The lasting contribution of the Avignon popes to the Catholic Church was neither their palace nor their frescoes: it was the first centralized bureaucracy of Christendom. Before Avignon, the Church functioned largely as a federation of local powers — bishops, metropolitans, religious orders — where the pope exercised a suzerainty more than direct administrative competences. After Avignon, the idea of a central pontifical government was acquired for good.

The Apostolic Chamber and pontifical taxation

The Camera apostolica (Apostolic Chamber) was the central organ of pontifical finances. Under John XXII, it was structured into specialized services: treasurer, apostolic collectors sent to every ecclesiastical province, auditors of the accounts. Yves Renouard, in his classic study Les relations des papes d'Avignon et des compagnies commerciales et bancaires de 1316 à 1378 (1941), showed that this administration rested on a close alliance with the Italian banking companies — Bardi, Peruzzi, Acciaiuoli before 1345, Alberti, Strozzi, Medici afterwards — which collected money throughout Europe and transferred it to Avignon by bills of exchange^[24].

On John XXII's death (1334), the pontifical treasury reached 800,000 florins of gold. On Benedict XII's death (1342), it exceeded a million florins^[25]. These figures made the Avignon papacy, in terms of liquid assets, the first financial power in Europe, surpassing the French royal treasury itself.

Beneficial reservations, annates, expectatives

The fiscal technique that made these figures possible comes down to three words: beneficial reservations, annates, expectatives^[26].

• Beneficial reservations: John XXII, by the constitution Ex debito (1316), reserved to the pope's direct nomination a growing number of categories of ecclesiastical benefices (bishoprics, abbeys, canonical prebends), instead of letting the local clergy elect. This power of provision became the central instrument of centralization and the main source of nepotism.
• Annates: with each pontifical collation, the beneficiary paid to the Apostolic Chamber the first year's revenue of the benefice. On a bishopric of 5,000 florins annual revenue, the annate represented an immediate receipt of 5,000 florins.
• Expectatives: promises of benefices to fall vacant at the next vacancy, sold in advance. A practice criticized by contemporaries for its proximity to simony.

To this were added tenths (a tenth levied on the whole clergy under pretext of crusade), common services (the tax each new bishop or abbot paid the pope on nomination), spoils (the goods of bishops dying intestate, recovered by the Apostolic Chamber), and fees for ad limina visits. The system was rational, effective, and deeply unpopular.

The pontifical library and the University of Avignon

The luminous cultural reverse of this centralization: the pontifical library of Avignon, inventoried in 1369, counted more than two thousand volumes — one of the largest libraries in Western Europe, surpassing those of the Sorbonne and Cluny^[27]. It housed patristic, scholastic and legal manuscripts, but also profane poetry (Petrarch), translated Arab science, Byzantine chronicles.

The University of Avignon, founded in 1303 by Boniface VIII, was strengthened by the Avignon popes who attracted first-rank jurists there. Clement VI himself, a theologian trained at Paris, made Avignon a centre of Catholic thought of which Étienne Anheim showed, in Clément VI au travail (Publications de la Sorbonne, 2014), that it was a genuine European intellectual laboratory, not a mere appendage of the curia^[28].

The pontificate of John XXII was marked, from 1331, by a major theological crisis: his personal teaching on the beatific vision, which he defended in a series of sermons, contradicted the common conviction of theologians and provoked lively opposition as far as the Sorbonne.

John XXII's sermons (1331-1332)

In four sermons delivered between 1 November 1331 (All Saints' Day) and January 1332, Pope John XXII upheld a counter-current thesis. In his view, the souls of the just, after their death, did not see God face to face as soon as they entered heaven; they were "under the altar" (cf. Revelation 6:9) and contemplated only the humanity of Christ; the beatific vision of the divine essence would only take place after the resurrection of the bodies at the Last Judgment^[29].

John XXII relied on certain patristic quotations (Saint Bernard, Sermon 3 for All Saints) and presented his position as the personal opinion of a doctor, not as definitive magisterial teaching. But the mere fact that a pope expressed this thesis from the pontifical pulpit created an earthquake.

The theological opposition: Paris and Jacques Fournier

The reaction was fulminating. The Faculty of Theology of Paris, in January 1334, formally condemned the thesis as erroneous and contrary to the Catholic faith. King Philip VI of Valois assembled at Vincennes a commission of theologians which reached the same conclusion. The Cistercian Cardinal Jacques Fournier — the future Benedict XII — wrote a long treatise of refutation in which he demonstrated, by Scripture, the Fathers and theological reason, that the purified soul sees God immediately after death^[30].

Under unanimous pressure, John XXII finally yielded. On 3 December 1334, on his deathbed, he pronounced a public retraction: he had, he said, upheld his thesis "as far as Holy Scripture and Catholic doctrine allow" and he submitted himself entirely to the Church's decision. He died the next day.

Benedictus Deus of Benedict XII (29 January 1336)

Elected three weeks later, Benedict XII made defining the beatific vision one of the first acts of his pontificate. The apostolic constitution Benedictus Deus, promulgated on 29 January 1336 at Avignon, dogmatically defined the immediate beatific vision of the souls of the fully purified just:

"The souls of all the saints… immediately after their death, or immediately after the purification already undergone, have seen, see and will see the divine essence by an intuitive and even face-to-face vision, without the mediation of any creature, so that the divine essence appears to them immediately, nakedly, clearly and openly." — Benedict XII, constitution Benedictus Deus, Avignon, 29 January 1336^[31]

It is one of the most solemn magisterial texts of the Middle Ages on the last things, taken up word for word by the Council of Florence (1439) in the decree Laetentur caeli and by the Catechism of the Catholic Church of 1992 (§ 1023). On the ecclesiological plane, the episode demonstrates something essential: a pope, as a private doctor, can err; but the Church corrects the pope through the pope himself — John XXII retracts before dying, Benedict XII defines. Pontifical infallibility, which Vatican I in 1870 would specify, applies only under strict conditions which John XXII never sought to fulfil.

The episode that weighs most heavily, in historical memory, on the pontificate of Clement V was the liquidation of the Order of the Temple.

The arrest of 13 October 1307

On the secret order of King Philip the Fair, all the Templars of the kingdom of France — about 2,000 men — were arrested simultaneously at dawn on Friday 13 October 1307. The round-up, perfectly prepared by the Keeper of the Seals Nogaret (appointed 22 September 1307)^[32], rested on massive accusations: heresy, sodomy, idolatry of a mysterious head called Baphomet, denial of Christ at profession. The order's goods were immediately seized. The Grand Master Jacques de Molay was thrown into prison.

Pope Clement V was presented with a fait accompli. He protested, by the bull Pastoralis praeeminentiae (22 November 1307), asked the sovereigns also to arrest the Templars of their kingdoms (so as to remove the proceedings from French justice alone), opened two parallel inquiries: a diocesan one on the persons, a pontifical one on the order itself. Sophia Menache, in her Clement V, showed that the pope resisted as much as he could but had no military means to oppose Philip the Fair head-on on French soil.

The Council of Vienne and the bull Vox in excelso (1312)

The crisis was brought before the ecumenical council of Vienne in Dauphiné, which opened on 16 October 1311. The conciliar Fathers were divided: the majority held that the accusations were unproven and that the Templars must be granted the right of defence — a right they had never had under Nogaret. Clement V, under enormous royal pressure (Philip the Fair presented himself at Vienne in March 1312 at the head of an army), took an intermediate decision in the bull Vox in excelso of 22 March 1312: he suppressed the Order of the Temple not by judgment (for lack of proof), but per modum provisionis seu ordinationis apostolicae — by way of administrative disposition, because no reform was any longer possible^[33].

The legal distinction is capital: the order was dissolved without being condemned. The goods were, by the bull Ad providam of 2 May 1312, transferred to the Order of the Hospital (except in Spain where they went to the Iberian orders) — thus to a religious order, and not to the royal treasury, thwarting Philip the Fair's main covetousness. But the Templar leaders remained the king's prisoners. Jacques de Molay and Geoffroy de Charnay were burned alive at Paris on 18 March 1314, two months before Clement V's death — whom they are said, according to legend, to have summoned to appear before God's tribunal within a year.

The affair remains one of history's open wounds of the Avignon pontificate: Clement V could not save the Templars, but he could avoid the dogmatic condemnation Philip the Fair wanted and which would have made the Templars formal heretics. Three centuries later, in 2002, the Vatican archivist Barbara Frale discovered the Chinon parchment (August 1308) in which Clement V, after hearing Jacques de Molay and other dignitaries, absolved the Templars of the accusations of heresy and restored them to ecclesial communion — a text kept secret between Avignon and the Crown^[34].

The image that prevailed for centuries was the one forged by Petrarch. Son of a Florentine White Guelph notary exiled by the Black Guelphs in 1302, Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) grew up at Carpentras (Comtat Venaissin) from 1312, studied law at Montpellier and Bologna, and spent almost all his active life between Avignon, Fontaine-de-Vaucluse and Italy. He knew the curia from the inside; he had his benefactors there (the Colonna family); there he met Laura on 6 April 1327. But he ended by hating Avignon with the passion of an intimate disappointed.

In the Liber sine nomine ("Book without a Name"), a collection of nineteen anonymous Latin letters composed between 1352 and 1361, Petrarch systematically denounced the corruption, luxury and French subservience of the Avignon papacy. But it was in the Canzoniere, in the three famous so-called Babylonian sonnets (136, 137, 138), that he fixed the image that would remain:

"Fountain of grief, dwelling of anger, school of errors and temple of heresy, once Rome, now false and guilty Babylon, for whom so much one weeps and sighs: O forge of deceits, O dreadful prison where good dies and where evil is nourished and grows, hell of the living — it would be a great miracle if Christ did not finally grow angry with you." — Petrarch, Canzoniere, sonnet 138, English translation^[35]

The expression "Babylon" is explicitly biblical: it likens the Avignon exile of the popes to the deportation of the Hebrews to Babylon (587-538 BC), as lamented by the prophet Jeremiah. It was this comparison that passed into posterity: people would henceforth speak of the seventy years of Babylonian captivity of the popes (from Clement V's election in 1305 to the return to Rome in 1377: 72 years, a rhetorical approximation of the seventy years of the Hebrew exile according to Jeremiah 25:11-12 — to be distinguished from the effective residence at Avignon, 1309-1376).

The historian must nevertheless hold three nuances. Petrarch wrote as a disappointed Italian humanist: his Roman patriotism, his nostalgia for Antiquity, his personal resentment (he had hoped, without obtaining it, for a cardinalate) coloured his pages. He largely omitted the true merits of the Avignon court — patronage, theology, Clement VI's charity toward the Jews, Urban V's holiness. But his criticism of curial taxation and of the pope's physical absence from Rome was just, and it was this that female sanctity would take up.

If Petrarch embodied humanist criticism, Saint Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) embodied the mystical conscience of the Church. Twenty-fourth child of a Sienese dyer, a Dominican tertiary (mantellata) with neither cloister nor habit, illiterate but gifted with dictated letters, she left a corpus of 381 letters, a Dialogue of Divine Providence and prayers which earned her proclamation as Doctor of the Church by Paul VI on 4 October 1970 — one of the first women in history to receive this title^[36].

From 1375, while Gregory XI still hesitated, Catherine multiplied letters to the pope urging the return. The tone was extraordinary: the young saint respectfully addressed the pope familiarly, calling him "my sweet babbo" (daddy, in familiar Italian), but pressed him with unexpected firmness. In letter 206 (Dupré Theseider edition), she wrote notably:

"Do not be a fearful child, but manly: open your mouth, and swallow the bitter for the sweet." — Saint Catherine of Siena, Letter to Gregory XI^[37]

Further on, she exhorted him to raise the standard of the holy Cross and come to Rome. Catherine went to Avignon in June 1376, accompanied by her confessor Blessed Raymond of Capua, a Dominican. There she received, with restraint but yielding nothing, the diplomatic advances of French cardinals who feared she might turn Gregory XI around. Catherine's exact role in the return decision is debated — Guillaume Mollat and Jean Favier stress that Gregory XI's political decision had matured independently, under the double pressure of the War of the Eight Saints and Bridget of Sweden's prophecies. But Catherine's spiritual role is indisputable: she gave Gregory XI the moral strength he lacked. She died at Rome on 29 April 1380, after vainly trying to prevent the Western Schism that followed.

Alongside Catherine, Saint Bridget of Sweden (1303-1373), a widow turned mystic and foundress of the Order of the Most Holy Saviour, played a parallel role. Her Revelationes celestes (eight books) denounced curial corruption, urged Urban V and Gregory XI to return to Rome, prophesied Urban V's death if he left again — a prophecy sadly verified three months later. Bridget would be canonized by Boniface IX in 1391.

Urban V's brief stay (1367-1370)

The first attempt was Urban V's. Prepared by the military pacification of the Papal States led by Cardinal Albornoz between 1353 and 1357, it materialized on 30 April 1367: the pontifical fleet left Marseille. Urban V landed at Corneto on 3 June 1367, reached Viterbo then made his triumphal entry into Rome on 16 October 1367^[38].

He settled at the Vatican rather than the Lateran (in ruins), restored the two basilicas, received the Catholic profession of faith of the Byzantine emperor John V Palaiologos (October 1369), opened negotiations for union with the Greek Church. But Italian security deteriorated: the bands of Bernabò Visconti threatened Rome, the Roman barons tore each other apart, plague reappeared. Under pressure from the French cardinals who had never liked Rome, Urban V yielded and left again for Avignon on 5 September 1370, despite the public entreaties of Saint Bridget of Sweden who predicted his death. He died indeed at Avignon on 19 December 1370.

Gregory XI's definitive journey (1376-1377)

Gregory XI did better than his predecessor. A personal vow to return to Rome made even before his election, Catherine of Siena's spiritual intervention in June 1376, the rapid deterioration of the War of the Eight Saints against Florence (which threatened to lose the Papal States): three converging forces.

The pope left Avignon on 13 September 1376 at the cost of painful scenes — a French cardinal threw himself to the ground to block the road, the pope's father wept publicly^[39]. The curia embarked at Marseille on 2 October 1376 on a fleet of twenty-two galleys leased from the king of Aragon and the Hospitallers. The crossing was gruelling (storms, wintering at Genoa), but Gregory XI landed at Corneto on 5 December 1376, reached Ostia, then sailed up the Tiber. He entered Rome on 17 January 1377, welcomed by the jubilant population.

The last weeks of his pontificate were occupied by Italian difficulties — fragile pacification with Florence, troubles at Rome. Gregory XI died at the Vatican on 27 March 1378, aged 48, after fifteen months spent at Rome.

Gregory XI's death immediately opened the gravest institutional crisis of the medieval Church. The mechanism of the disaster is simple to reconstruct.

The contested election of Urban VI (8 April 1378)

The conclave that assembled at the Vatican on 7 April 1378 brought together sixteen cardinals, eleven French, four Italian and one Spanish. The French majority was thus clear. But outside, the Roman crowd besieged the Vatican crying "Romano lo volemo, o almanco italiano!" ("we want him Roman, or at least Italian!"). Several cardinals, fearing riots, voted under pressure. On 8 April 1378, they elected Bartolomeo Prignano, the Neapolitan archbishop of Bari (not a cardinal), who took the name Urban VI. Crowning on 18 April 1378^[40].

The drama erupted swiftly. Urban VI, by character, proved of an impossible roughness: he publicly insulted the cardinals, refused their counsel, demanded humiliating reforms. Several French cardinals left Rome in June 1378, joined Anagni, then Fondi in the kingdom of Naples, and there declared, by the declaration of 2 August 1378, that the election of 8 April had been extorted by fear (metus) and was therefore canonically invalid.

The election of the antipope Clement VII (20 September 1378)

Assembled at Fondi under the protection of Queen Joan I of Naples, thirteen cardinals — all those who had elected Urban VI five months earlier, except the three Italians who stayed at Rome — proceeded to a second election on 20 September 1378. They chose Robert of Geneva, former legate known for the severity of his repression of the Cesena revolt in 1377, who took the name Clement VII. He settled at Avignon on 20 June 1379^[41].

This was the Western Schism. Two popes, two courts, two obediences: Rome (Urban VI, Boniface IX, Innocent VII, Gregory XII) and Avignon (Clement VII, Benedict XIII). From 1409, the Council of Pisa added a third obedience (Alexander V, John XXIII). Christendom was split: France, Spain, Scotland, Naples recognized Avignon; England, the Empire, Hungary, Poland, Scandinavia recognized Rome.

The resolution at the Council of Constance (1417)

The crisis lasted thirty-nine years. It was resolved by the ecumenical council of Constance (1414-1418), the greatest ecclesiastical gathering of the Middle Ages, under the impetus of Emperor Sigismund. Resignation of Gregory XII (4 July 1415), deposition of John XXIII (29 May 1415) and of Benedict XIII (26 July 1417), then election of Pope Martin V (Oddone Colonna) on 11 November 1417, who became the first universally recognized pope since Gregory XI.

But the council, in the decree Haec sancta synodus of 6 April 1415 and the decree Frequens of 9 October 1417, defended a dangerous conciliarist thesis — the superiority of the council over the pope —, a thesis later reproved by the council of Lateran V (1516), but which Luther would still invoke in his appeal to a general council of 28 November 1518^[42]. The Avignon papacy, by its excesses and its immobility, left the Church a triple wound: curial taxation, French nepotism, and the conciliarist doctrine born of the need to exit the schism.

Modern historiography has corrected the caricature

The strictly negative view of the Avignon papacy — sumptuous, sold to France, unworthy of its mission — comes straight from Petrarch, relayed by 16th-century Protestant polemic^[43] then by 19th-century French anticlerical historiography, notably Jules Michelet.

This view has been systematically corrected by seven generations of historians since the early 20th century. The names to retain are:

• Guillaume Mollat (1877-1968), Les papes d'Avignon (1305-1378), ten editions from 1912 to 1965 (Letouzey & Ané): the great erudite synthesis, establishing the statistical reality of the Avignon clergy;
• Bernard Guillemain, La Cour pontificale d'Avignon (1309-1376). Étude d'une société (De Boccard, 1962, 810 pages, Prix Gobert 1964): pioneering prosopography of the curia, demonstrating that the court was no more extravagant than the great contemporary royal courts^[44];
• Yves Renouard (1908-1965), La papauté à Avignon (PUF, Que sais-je?, 1954, multiple reissues): the reference academic synthesis;
• Jean Favier (1932-2014), Les papes d'Avignon (Fayard, 2006): the great synthesis in French for the lettered readership;
• Sophia Menache, Clement V (Cambridge UP, 1998): largely exonerates Clement V from the accusation of servility;
• Joëlle Rollo-Koster, Avignon and Its Papacy, 1309-1417 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015): an explicit programme of "rehabilitating from the black legend";
• Étienne Anheim (EHESS), Clément VI au travail. Lire, écrire, prêcher au XIVᵉ siècle (Publications de la Sorbonne, 2014): shows Clement VI as a serious intellectual and lettered pastor;
• Hélène Millet, L'Église du Grand Schisme (1378-1417) (Picard, 2009): the reference on exiting the schism.

The lasting achievements of the Avignon papacy

Three achievements are incontestable.

First, administrative centralization. The idea of a Church governed from a single centre — with its dicasteries, collectors, Rota, Apostolic Chamber — was Avignon's invention. All later developments (Tridentine Curia, contemporary dicasteries, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith) are its heirs.

Secondly, intellectual and artistic culture. A pontifical library of more than two thousand volumes, patronage of Simone Martini, Matteo Giovannetti, Petrarch, Clement VI's doctrinal preaching, the University of Avignon as a European legal hub — Avignon was a laboratory of the Renaissance before the Renaissance.

Thirdly, the constitution Benedictus Deus of Benedict XII in 1336: one of the greatest medieval magisterial texts on the last things, received word for word at Florence in 1439 and in the Catechism of 1992. Without John XXII and his retraction, without Benedict XII and his definition, the doctrine of the immediate beatific vision would not have been fixed before the modern councils.

The real shadows: nepotism, taxation, distance from Rome

Historiographical corrections permit no blindness. Three shadows remain.

Limousin nepotism was massive. Of the 134 cardinals created by the seven Avignon popes, about 111 were French, and among them an overwhelming majority of Limousins and Quercynois^[45]. Clement VI, Innocent VI and Gregory XI all three came from the diocese of Limoges. It was this regional clique that would elect Urban VI under Roman pressure, then Clement VII at Fondi a few months later, triggering the schism.

Curial taxation was technically justifiable (the Church needed money for crusades, the administration of the Papal States, diplomacy), but it became morally unbearable. Annates, expectatives, spoils set against Rome not only princes but the lower clergy and the Christian people. When Luther denounced, in 1517, the injustice of the indulgence trade, he inherited a current of fiscal grumbling of which Avignon taxation — annates, expectatives, spoils — was one of the distant seedbeds^[46].

Distance from Rome was, finally, the gravest shadow. The pope is the bishop of Rome, successor of Saint Peter in the Roman see. Leaving it for sixty-seven years, even for serious reasons, symbolically weakened the office. Gregory XI's return repaired the situation materially, but the institutional trauma persisted: Vatican II, in thinking the Church anew as people of God and no longer merely as a French-style centralized monarchy, inherited questions Avignon had not resolved.

The Avignon Papacy is one of the great anomalies in the history of the Catholic Church. For sixty-seven years (1309-1376), seven consecutive popes governed the universal Church from a Provençal city instead of Rome. These seven popes were all legitimate — none of the modern sedevacantist positions can rely on Avignon — and all Catholic: there was no antipope at Avignon before the explosion of 1378.

Avignon was not a French city but a land of the kingdom of Arles dependent on the Empire, a vassal of the king of Naples, then papal land after the purchase of 1348. The neighbouring Comtat Venaissin had been papal since 1274. The pope's presence at Avignon was the occasion to invent the first centralized bureaucracy of the Latin Church, to build the largest civil Gothic palace in the West, and to dogmatically define the beatific vision through Benedict XII's constitution Benedictus Deus (1336).

But it also dug three shadows: massive Limousin nepotism, hardened ecclesiastical taxation, of which the 16th-century Reformation inherited the grievance, and distance from Rome whose consequences the return of 1377 did not erase. The crisis indeed turned back on Gregory XI's death: the contested election of Urban VI (8 April 1378) then the schismatic election of Clement VII at Fondi (20 September 1378) opened the Western Schism, resolved only in 1417 at the Council of Constance.

On the spiritual plane, two holy women — Catherine of Siena and Bridget of Sweden — weighed more than all theologians and all princes in bringing the pope back to Rome. It is one of Avignon's deepest lessons: at times when the ecclesiastical hierarchy fails, the saints — often lay people, often women — raise the Church up by their letters, prayers and courage. Blessed Urban V, alone beatified of the seven, testifies for his part that holiness within the Avignon curia was possible, even if it remained a minority.

The historian must therefore hold two truths together. First truth: the Avignon Papacy was not the absolute ignominy the black legend made of it. It instituted, created, defined, protected (notably the Jews under Clement VI during the Black Death of 1348). Second truth: it paid for its remoteness from Rome with a devastating schism, and the Church took a century to recover from it — without ever forgetting the lesson. That is why the Second Vatican Council would insist, in thinking collegial episcopacy and the Roman dimension of the papacy, on what Avignon had weakened.

• Read the Investiture Controversy: the great earlier crisis between spiritual and temporal power.
• Read the Gregorian Reform: the matrix of pontifical authority Boniface VIII tried to prolong against Philip the Fair.
• Read the Council of Vienne (1311-1312): the ecumenical council that suppressed the Order of the Temple under Clement V.
• Read the University of Paris and Scholasticism: it was the Paris Faculty of Theology that condemned, in 1334, John XXII's erroneous sermons on the beatific vision.
• Read the Council of Constance (1414-1418): the exit from the crisis of the Western Schism caused by the end of Avignon.
• Read the Second Council of Lyon (1274): it was on this occasion that the Comtat Venaissin was ceded to the pope by Philip III.
• Read the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith: the distant heir of the administrative centralization invented at Avignon.